Oral Tradition or Coincidence?

I started digging into the legend of Hezekiah Wyman after reading the brief description of that episode in David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride and later the original version, “The White Horseman” from 1835.

How, I wondered, did that purple legend, which didn’t even retell the story of the shooting on Lexington common correctly, get into so many history books? Could there nonetheless have been a real person behind the unreal tale?

A family named Wyman settled in Woburn in the early 1600s, and they had lots of male descendants. As a result, by the late 1700s you couldn’t throw a stone in parts of Middlesex County without hitting a Wyman. In the published vital records of Woburn, the list of marriages involving people named Wyman runs from the bottom of page 313 to the top of page 324.

Therefore, if an author sat down to write a fictional story about a Middlesex County farmer in 1775, and wanted a name that sounded believable, he (or she) could do a lot worse than to choose the surname Wyman.

As for the given name Hezekiah, in a study titled “Continuity and Discontinuity in Puritan Naming: Massachusetts, 1771,” Prof. Daniel Scott Smith found that Hezekiah was the 62nd most common name in his sample of taxpayers. As a comparison, the 62nd most common name for American men born in 1950—i.e., men who would be the same age as the fictional Hezekiah Wyman today—is Samuel. Not uncommon at all. (Though I have to acknowledge that the distribution of names across the population wasn’t the same.)

The name Hezekiah apparently lost popularity in America in the early 1800s. Out of a sample from the 1850 census list of 30,000 names of males born between 1800 and 1830, Douglas Galbi found fewer than 30 named Hezekiah. Of course, that was a national sample, not limited to New England, but the trend seems solid. (Presently Hezekiah is bouncing around the 900th spot as most common name for male babies in America.)

Thus, calling a character Hezekiah would signal early-19th-century readers that he dated from a previous era, the time of their grandfathers.

I therefore hypothesized that whoever wrote “The White Horseman” came up with the name Hezekiah Wyman along those lines, as a fictional character meant to evoke the old men of Revolutionary days.

Later in the nineteenth century, after the story’s original literary context in The Boston Pearl had faded away, new authors rediscovered “The White Horseman” and went looking for Hezekiah Wyman. And they found him! Okay, he wasn’t a sixty-year-old from Lexington; he was a fifty-four-year-old from what became Winchester. (Or that man’s son, from Weston.) And they found no contemporaneous evidence for a Wyman riding on 19 Apr 1775. But they were able to correct the later versions of the story that said Hezekiah was eighty years old.

Given the frequency of the names Wyman and Hezekiah, however, how unlikely was it to find a man of that name within riding distance of the Battle Road? The real Hezekiah Wyman’s 1779 will shows that he had a “white mare” (which he used with a “Horse cart”) and a “Gun.” But again, lots of established Massachusetts farmers had horses and guns.

Was the identification of the hero of “The White Horseman” with Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn like connecting the grave of Israel Bissell out in Hinsdale with a post rider on 19 April—a name that, simply by coincidence, matched an unreliable document?

Or was there some truth to the “White Horseman” legend, however its author had dressed up the details? Supporting this possibility is how the story alluded to the documented ambush of British supply wagons in Menotomy, apparently using local oral traditions not fully set down until almost thirty years later. So had the author heard a tale about a rider named Hezekiah Wyman, and decided to run with it?

In the end, I came back to the original appeal of the story.

TOMORROW: At last, the British army perspective.

“Together with My Gun”

Back to the truth and fictions of Hezekiah Wyman. As I’ve noted, there was a fifty-four-year-old man named Hezekiah Wyman living in south Woburn (now Winchester) in 1775. Those details don’t exactly match the sixty-year-old Hezekiah Wyman living in central Lexington in “The White Horseman.” But was he close enough to have been that fictional story’s inspiration?

Earlier in this series I reported how Chris Hurley, who researches Woburn’s Revolutionary history, supplied me with a quotation from Hezekiah Wyman’s will confirming that he did indeed have a white horse when he died in 1779. That same will confirms that he had two others things which some sources ascribe to him.

First, Hezekiah listed his children as “my Sons Hezikiah, Seth, Daniel, Isaac & Joseph &...my Daughter Susanna.” The eldest son I’ve already mentioned as on the list of Weston militiamen who marched on 19 Apr 1775. The two genealogies of Isaac Chauncey Wyman I quoted back here both say he descended from Hezekiah through a son named Isaac, and this will confirms that there was such a son. (It doesn’t offer information about that son’s birth date, however.)

Furthermore, the will give son Daniel, in addition to the livestock already listed, “my Horse cart, & all my husbandry Utensils, together with my Gun.” So Hezekiah Wyman definitely owned a gun in 1779.

According to Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts (1908), Hezekiah “bequeathed outside his family the gun he carried” on 19 Apr 1775, but Isaac Chauncey Wyman bought it back. So there’s a contradiction there.

Perhaps by “outside his family” Isaac Chauncey Wyman meant out of his own particular line. Indeed, if his grandfather’s gun was in the hands of a cousin, that would make it more plausible that he could buy back the very same musket about a century later.

What’s more, Chris Hurley has tracked down the musket that Isaac Chauncey Wyman owned. In New Jersey.

TOMORROW: The story that musket tells.

“The Gun He Carried on that Eventful Day”

Normally the people most eager to preserve and retell the stories of a man’s heroism in the Revolutionary War are his descendants. The case of Hezekiah Wyman is unusual in that a heroic story about him was widely published and republished starting in 1835, but there was no family lore about him in print until sixty years later.

Isaac Chauncey (or Chauncy) Wyman (1827-1910, shown here) was an attorney in Salem. He never married, and left over two million dollars to his alma mater, Princeton. (This bequest turned out to affect Woodrow Wilson’s political career in a backhanded way, but that’s a different story.) Edward Wall’s Reminiscences of Princeton College, 1845-1848 contains an unflattering and rather sad profile of this Wyman. A member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, he appears to be the source of statements about his family history published around the turn of the last century.

An 1895 volume of The Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, collecting profiles about lawyers for sale to those same lawyers, says this about Isaac Chauncey Wyman:

His father [Isaac] was born in Cambridge, January 1, 1762, and died in Salem in 1836, having been present at the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill and at the siege of Boston, acting as a substitute for an uncle who was a lieutenant colonel under General [John] Stark, and afterwards serving until the end of the war.

Isaac, the father, was the son of Hezekiah Wyman, a soldier in the army of General [James] Wolfe, who was born in Woburn and was the fifth son of Capt. [Seth] Wyman, memorable for the conduct of “Lovewell’s Fight” and who died of wounds received in that affair.

Lt. Col. Isaac Wyman (1724-1792) of Keene, New Hampshire, did indeed serve under Stark from 23 Apr 1775 to the end of that year. He then returned to New Hampshire and became a colonel in the state militia. His son Isaac (1756-1835) received a pension for Revolutionary military service.

I have no idea why this lieutenant colonel would need a “substitute,” and doubt anyone would have seen a thirteen-year-old boy as a fair replacement. Possibly the author meant “subordinate” or “subaltern”—but I’m not finding records to match that.

Capt. Seth Wyman (1686-1725) was indeed celebrated for “Lovewell’s Fight,” a guerilla battle with Pequawket fighters in the Maine woods in 1725 which sounds like a dreadful affair all around. He didn’t die of his wounds, but of dysentery on a subsequent mission.

I’ll address the other statements about Hezekiah and Isaac Wyman as they appear in more detail in volume 4 of Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts (1908). This series, edited by William Richard Cutter [him again!], combined family lore and genealogical research. Like the book on lawyers, the series was probably financed by the families it discussed.

The entry on the Wyman family describes Hezekiah this way:

He was a soldier in the French and Indian war, and was in General Wolfe’s army at the battle of Quebec. Tradition has it that he pointed out the secret path that led to the Heights of Abraham, by which the British and Americans were led to the plateau, met the French on equal footing and conquered the city.

In recognition of his services in this campaign he was granted a manor in New York, but never claimed his grant, and it was finally taken up by squatters.

When the revolution came he marched with his company on the Lexington alarm and took part in the fighting at Concord, April 19. 1775. When he died he bequeathed outside his family the gun he carried on that eventful dav, but it is now in the possession of his grandson, Isaac Chauncy Wyman, of Salem.

He was fifty-five years old at the time of the battle, and lived but a few years afterward. A picture of him, seated upon a white horse, is preserved in the public library at Woburn. His home was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in later years.

I can’t find Hezekiah Wyman listed as a veteran of Wolfe’s campaign against Quebec, or elsewhere in the French and Indian War. In 1890 the Winchester Historical Society published a list of the town’s veterans of that war, and it doesn’t include him.

A “manor in New York” should be well documented. But the only land grant connected to Hezekiah Wyman that I can find was in Massachusetts. In its 1772-73 session, the legislature granted “Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn” and his brother Ross some land in reward for their father Seth’s services in 1725. The province had granted Seth land which turned out to be over the New Hampshire border. In compensation, Ross and Hezekiah were allowed to develop 500 acres in western Massachusetts instead.

As for Hezekiah Wyman pointing out the secret path up the cliffs to Quebec, that’s an incredible feat for someone who’d never been in the area, isn’t it?

Most interestingly, this family lore says Hezekiah Wyman “marched with his company on the Lexington alarm.” It doesn’t mention him riding a white horse alone, though obviously that story had made it to the Woburn public library. Isaac Chauncey Wyman had supposedly brought his grandfather Hezekiah’s gun back into the family, presumably by buying it—yet his lore makes no mention of extraordinary marksmanship.

The same entry states that Hezekiah’s son Isaac was born in 1756, not 1762, which makes service in the siege of Boston much more likely—unless the genealogists simply confused him with his New Hampshire cousin. Further statements about Isaac:

He was an active and influential patriot in revolutionary days, and a distinguished military figure. He was with his father in the battle of Concord, and rose step by step to the rank of colonel of a cavalry regiment, or horse troops, as they were called. . . .

Colonel Wyman acquired military habits of arbitrary thought and action during the war, and was rather austere and stern. In business he commanded, and his word was law… Like most of the Continental army officers, he was a Free Mason.

He married, July 2, 1820, Elizabeth Ingalls. born in Lynn, January 19, 1789, daughter of Henry Ingalls, an officer at one time of the famous frigate “Constitution.”

I can’t find any mention of an officer on the Constitution named Henry Ingalls.

The only Revolutionary War officer named Isaac Wyman, “horse troops” or not, was the older man from New Hampshire. It’s possible that Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s father achieved the rank of colonel in the militia during peacetime, as stated in a 1910 N.E.H.G.S. obituary. It’s also possible that’s just one more unverifiable thing he said.

One final curiosity about these entries is that, although they give a detailed portrait of Isaac Wyman’s personality, they don’t offer a specific date of death. The latter doesn’t even state a definite year: “about 1836.” That suggests there was some rupture in the family. Several issues of the Salem Gazette in November 1836 carried an advertisement dated the first of that month saying Isaac’s widow Elizabeth had been appointed to administer his estate, meaning he’d died intestate. Isaac Chauncey Wyman was then only eight or nine.

So what can we conclude from Isaac Chauncey Wyman’s family lore?

• He really, really wanted to have ancestors with distinguished military records.
• A lot of the information he passed on can’t be confirmed from reliable sources.
• Despite his hunger for ancestral glory and his low standards of evidence, Isaac Chauncey Wyman didn’t think of his grandfather as the legendary “White Horseman.”

Instead, this Wyman imagined his grandpa Hezekiah and his father Isaac marching together on 19 Apr 1775.

COMING UP: After a pause for Bunker Hill, some concluding thoughts on Hezekiah Wyman.

Young James Russell and a Load of Green Peas

Aside from David Kinnison, who appears to have been ready to tell any Revolutionary story if it would get him a dinner in Chicago around the year 1850, did anyone claim to have actually seen Hezekiah Wyman shooting British soldiers on 19 Apr 1775?

In 1864, the Rev. Samuel Abbott Smith of Arlington believed he had identified such a witness. In his history of that village’s experiences on the first day of the Revolutionary War, Smith wrote:

Through their whole retreat the British had noticed one man in particular, whom they learned especially to dread. He was an old, gray-haired hunter, named Wyman of Woburn, and he rode a fine white horse. He struck the trail as they left Concord, and would ride up within gunshot, then turning the horse throw himself off, aim his long gun resting on the saddle, and that aim was death. They would say, “Look out, there is the man on the white horse.”

He followed them the whole distance, and James Russell, the father of James Russell, Esq., then a boy of a dozen years, from behind a house on Charlestown street, saw him gallop across the brook and up the hill, pursued by a party of the flank guard who kept the plains midway between Charlestown and Main streets. He turned, aimed, and the boy saw one of the British fall. He rode on, and soon the same gun was heard again, this time also with deadly effect.

Smith’s footnotes indicated that he’d heard about Wyman from two people:

• “James Russell, Esq.,” a former state senator who died in 1863.
• Thomas Hall, who had married a granddaughter of the Hannah Adams driven from her home on 19 Apr 1775.

Of course, given how widely “The White Horseman” had been reprinted by 1864, lots of people had read about Hezekiah Wyman picking off redcoats with his long gun. The published tale could have supplemented, enhanced, or even launched Arlington’s oral traditions. How, for instance, was twelve-year-old James Russell able to identify the “old, gray-haired hunter” by name if he’d simply seen the man ride past at a distance?

On the other hand, since the published tales said Wyman was from Lexington, how did Smith’s version identify him as “Wyman of Woburn,” the only town with a documented older Hezekiah Wyman?

Was the first James Russell a reliable witness? Arlington vital records say that he was born in April 1763 and died in 1846. He married Rebecca Adams in 1783 (not the daughter of the Hannah Adams mentioned above). James and Rebecca Russell had their first child six months later, and their second son James in 1788. They thus had plenty of time to pass on Revolutionary stories to their kids.

Perhaps too much time. Here’s another Russell family tale, preserved in the second volume of Historic Homes and Places and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (1908), edited by William R. Cutter, descendant of yet another Arlington family.

[James Russell] was twelve years old at the time of the battle of Bunker Hill. The day of the battle he and a younger brother drove to Salem with a load of green peas and sold the produce, but the boys were held up by British soldiers at the spot now known as Medford Square, in Medford, and ordered to help carry the dead and wounded from the battle field. The boys had no liking for the dreadful work, and seized an opportunity to make their escape.

How could British soldiers, dying by the score to win the Charlestown peninsula, get to Medford Square? Could these two young boys have ended up on the British side of the siege lines? Was this story garbled in transmission? If so, what does that say about other tales this man’s son passed on in his old age?

TOMORROW: The Wyman family’s own stories.

The Documented Life of Hezekiah Wyman

There really was a Hezekiah Wyman in Middlesex County on 19 Apr 1775. In fact, there were two, father and son.

The son was born in Woburn in 1747 and married in Weston in 1770. Daniel S. Lamson’s History of the Town of Weston (1913) lists this Hezekiah Wyman as marching with the Weston militia company on 19 April and serving seven days in all. But he was only twenty-eight years old, presumably far from having white hair. So we have to focus on his father.

At the start of this series of postings, what seems like so many weeks ago, I quoted David H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride: “On the morning of April 19, 1775, Hezekiah Wyman turned fifty-five.” I suspect that was a misreading of a sentence in Henry Smith Chapman’s History of Winchester (1936): “Hezekiah was fifty-five on the morning of the Lexington alarm.” Chapman meant only that Wyman was that age, not that he turned fifty-five on 19 April.

But Chapman’s math was wrong. The vital records of Woburn, published in 1890, say that Hezekiah Wyman was born on 5 Aug 1720. He was therefore fifty-four years old during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Not “sixty years last November,” as “The White Horseman” says.

This Hezekiah Wyman was also living in the southern part of Woburn, which later became Winchester. But according to “The White Horseman,” he lived within sight of Lexington common: “the window of [his] house overlooked the ground where these murders were committed.”

Samuel Sewall’s History of Woburn (1868), one of the best nineteenth-century local histories of Middlesex villages and towns, has only one thing to say about this Hezekiah Wyman’s military service. As of 1777 he had been called up for service, but had either served or paid for a substitute. Sewall recorded no details about him on 19 Apr 1775, and his name doesn’t appear on the muster lists of Woburn’s companies that day.

Is there any detail that the real Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn shares with the hero of “The White Horseman”? Chris Hurley kindly sent me this quotation from Wyman’s will, which is docket #25880 in the Middlesex County Probate records:

I give unto my son Daniel my pair of red Oxen, my Stears coming two Years old, one red & two speckled Cows, & three Heifers one coming three, & two coming two years old, and my white mare

So Hezekiah Wyman really did have a white horse. He wrote that will shortly before dying in 1779.

TOMORROW: The literary life of Hezekiah Wyman.

Bringing Up the Boston Pearl

Investigating what Hezekiah Wyman did on 19 Apr 1775 meant finding the story about him published in the Boston Pearl sometime before 1840. That’s all that Henry Smith Chapman’s History of Winchester could say about the tale’s earliest source.

Not very long ago, that would have required someone to find every issue of the Boston Pearl from that period and read through them, hoping not to miss anything. This was time-consuming work with limited rewards. Usually it was left to the class of people called “grad students.”

Nowadays, digital archives make searching much, much quicker—though still not perfect, the quirks of rare publications, old type, and optical character recognition software being as they are.

In this case, a couple of years back I used Readex’s Archive of Americana service to find an item about Hezekiah Wyman in the Vermont Gazette for 6 Oct 1835; it was titled “The White Horseman” and said to be reprinted “From the Boston Pearl.” More recently I found the same article in the 14 Oct 1835 Rhode Island Republican.

Since then, Google Books digitized the first volume of the Army and Navy Chronicle, which reprinted “The White Horseman” on 8 Oct 1835. That cluster of reprints suggests that the story had appeared in the Pearl some weeks earlier.

Then it was up to Charles Bahne, using another database at a local university library, to find the original. “The White Horseman” made its debut on pages 398-9 of the 22 Aug 1835 issue of the Boston Pearl and Literary Gazette, credited to “A Soldier of the Revolution” and labeled as “Original” to that magazine. Charlie and I have gone through those early texts and found no significant differences among them.

TOMORROW: But there are some telling details.

Hunting for Hezekiah Wyman

The last tale of the Battle of Lexington and Concord I’ll address this season is one I first came across in David H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. That book says:

Many on both sides remembered a middle-aged militiaman named Hezekiah Wyman, from the outlying hamlet of Woburn that is now the town of Winchester. This day was his birthday. On the morning of April 19, 1775, Hezekiah Wyman turned fifty-five. His wife told him he was too old to fight, but he saddled his “strong white mare” and galloped away. He collided with the British column on the Road east of Lexington, fired at an advancing Regular and brought him down.

Hezekiah Wyman became highly visible on the battlefield—a “tall, gaunt man” with long gray locks, mounted on a white horse. The British infantry saw him many times from Lexington to Charlestown, and grew to dread the sight of him.

Wyman was a crack shot. Again and again he rode within range of the British vanguard, jumped off his horse, and laid the long barrel of his musket across the saddle. As the Regulars approached he took careful aim, and squeezed off a shot with slow deliberation. Then he remounted and rode ahead to a new position—a grim, gray-headed messenger of mortality, mounted on death’s pale horse.

I remember being struck by how cinematic this episode was. Imagine the scene through the eyes of British soldiers: a white horse with its tall rider galloping across the hillsides parallel to the road. The soldiers anxiously watch the man bend his course slightly until he comes within the range they know will be fatal to one of them.

At that time, I wasn’t tracing footnotes, and there weren’t so many great digital resources to consult as there are now. Fischer offered one citation for this paragraph, to Henry Smith Chapman’s 1936 History of Winchester.

Chapman, in turn, cited as his main source a newspaper article reprinting an item about Wyman from an issue of the Boston Pearl published sometime before 1840. Woburn/Winchester records confirm that Hezekiah Wyman existed, but say nothing about his activities on 19 Apr 1775. For that, we need to find and evaluate the earliest accounts.

TOMORROW: Diving deep for the Boston Pearl.